When I got back to my room, Lacey and the other two Airmen were still out. Flip was awake, laying on her sleeping bag with a book resting on her chest. She gave me a slight wave as I entered, but seemed focused on her reading material until she realized I had stopped.

"What's up?" she asked.

"All that information - that's stuff you've been telling people, right?"

"Everywhere I stopped that didn't have its own mind-talking guy or gal." She grimaced. "I guess I can't count on that, though. If it missed getting spread here..."

"Can you let Arsenal command know? I don't know if Major Fitzgerald is specially incompetent or just normally incompetent."

"Was already planning on it."

I nodded in thanks and made my way back to my kids.

Pointy and Deskbot were conferring. I’d had some vague thoughts of listening in on them, reasoning that there'd be no reason to keep their sounds from reaching a spot where a person they couldn't sense was sleeping. I’d overlooked that there was no need for them to speak at a human speed or use English to transmit data. Instead of listening to them talk, I heard only a vague warbling whistle that reminded me a little bit of logging onto dialup internet. The slight nostalgia of the noise didn't make it any less annoying, and I ended up moving to the far side of Cassie and sleeping in silence.

In the morning, Flip and her crew packed up.

Pointy’s farewell to Lacey and Deskbot seemed sincere. I got the impression she’d gotten along with the robotic AI much better than she did with Irving. It was a shame that they were leaving. Pointy needed a friend, this week more than ever. I had asked the pair to stay, but even though Lacey’s face was bone-white as she eyed the glider, she had shaken her head. “I’ve got my duties. Just… someone find me a sleeping pill. At least a blindfold?”

I thought Pointy looked sad as they disappeared into the sky, but that might have just been me projecting. The next Deadline was coming up in a few hours, the start of Day 4 of this twelve-day cycle. I had more than nine full days until the Novelty reset, and I couldn’t even be sure that would fix our problems.

The Deadline brought the floating jellyfish-things we’d seen during the Mandatory Trial, preemptively dubbed gasbags based on information the Flip had gathered. Unexpectedly, they appeared on the ground, limp and flat like deflated balloons. They inflated within minutes, however, and whatever they used to keep themselves aloft was toxic and didn’t disappear when they did. It wasn’t lethal, but it burned the eyes and lungs, making it hard to breathe or see until you got healing. The dangling tentacles were covered in poisonous barbs as well, making the gasbags another enemy that absolutely shouldn’t be fought at close range. I could pop them with a slingstone and they were quite flammable, so they didn’t present a real problem for our little group. Even their silent movement through the air didn’t make them particularly dangerous to us, since Life Sense made it impossible for them to sneak up on me.

The next several days passed almost without my noticing, only a few standout events even registering to my preoccupied mind as I tried to figure out ways to get through to Pointy.

After the gasbags arrived on Day 4, I’d tried writing out a story about the Moretti family for Gavin to repeat to Pointy as fiction. She’d listened politely enough and told Gavin it was a nice story, but she didn’t seem to connect his words to reality.

Day 5 was Matilda’s trial. I was a little worried about it, and dragged myself out of my funk long enough to attend. My concern was unnecessary. Mayor Alexandra threw out all the accusations of treason.

“Treason is against America, yes? Or perhaps against Fort Autumn, but we were not a fort yet and had no charter, so only against America would apply. No. These Dragons were murderers and criminals, not a foreign army.”

The arguing went on for a while, with Matilda’s accusers then arguing that she had aided criminals, a more reasonable charge. Matilda tried to argue back against this, saying that the man she’d helped “wasn’t really a bad guy,” but that wasn’t really something that could be proved either way, since the Dragon she’d helped had long since left the area. Alexandra found her guilty of being an “accessory after the fact” to murder, and sentenced her to six months of community service.

Growing food.

Like Matilda was doing already.

I was still a bit curious about her actions, but I had my own concerns to focus on. Matilda was safe, she wasn’t being kicked out, check check, moving on.

That evening, I tried holding a conversation with Pointy via Gavin, with my son repeating my words to the turtle, and me intentionally using the most sesquipedalian words could dig out of the logophilic dictionary contained in my brain. There were a lot of “Whaaaats?” from Gavin and requests that I repeat the things he was supposed to say, but he trooped through it, gamely tripping over every grandiloquent syllable regardless of the opacity of the meaning therein. After we’d kept it up for a bit, I had Gavin question her about it.

“Hey Pointy, you know I don’t know the words I’m saying, right?”

She frowned. “They do seem a departure from your standard lexicon, but then how are you conversing with me?”

“Huh?”

Pointy shook herself. “If you don’t know the words, how are you using them to talk with me?”

“Mom is telling them to me!”

“I am sorry, Gavin. I did not catch that. Can you repeat it?”

Sigh.

On Day 6, they started tearing down our house to make room for the growing Fort Autumn wall. That made all of us a little morose, so we spent as much of the day out hunting as we could. Cassie continually asked Pointy who killed the monsters that Micah and I eliminated, which either got the answer of “What monster?” or “Another human,” seemingly dependent on how close the enemy had gotten to Cassie before it expired.

Day 7 brought the frogdeer, the slime-skinned quadrupeds we’d seen in the Mandatory Trial and been warned about by Camo Guy during my Challenge. They made it a little harder to be out with the kids, because they were both large and fast. As Camo Guy had noted, they tended to make long leaps, during which they couldn’t change direction, which ought to have made them easy to dodge… but I couldn’t trust Cassie to dodge just yet, so I frequently had to block. Parry made that possible, but truly unpleasant. The animals were about the same size and build as Earth deer, but their heads were wide and flat, with a serrated set of mandibles surrounding their mouths. Sure, I could activate Parry and get my shield out in front of their mouths, trying to knock them away, but the damn things had a lot of momentum. When you stopped the head, the body and legs didn’t just politely take a number, so I got clipped frequently. They didn’t seem to have any particular resistances to any type of damage, and were fairly easy to kill with just about anything as long as you could hit them.

That night, we tested Pointy with some of the classic AI-breaking paradoxes, like telling her “this statement is false” and asking her if a set of all sets contained itself. I’m not even sure what I hoped to accomplish, since we had plenty of ways to make Pointy lock up, but it turns out that the classic AI-traps weren’t among them. She did have a very good conversation with my youngest two about what a paradox was. They might have learned something, I suppose.

On Day 8 I got pulled in on a council meeting. Alexandra had been deflecting and delaying Major Fitzgerald for several days as she dealt with existing issues and got set up. Alexandra had gotten a team going making reusable sanitary napkins and set up a drop-off and pickup system for Cleansing them. She’d also set up separate play areas for kids with differing amounts of Points. There wasn’t much in the areas, yet, but it was nice to let the kids relax with other kids who couldn’t accidentally tear off each other’s arms.

The major had insisted on the meeting, and was trying to build on Alexandra’s playgrounds, wanting everyone to wear insignia denoting their Ability strength. He was justifying it by calling the number their “rank,” but we weren’t soldiers.

“Surely you see the use in being able to visually assess the capabilities of our defenders?”

I shrugged. “That would have been dangerous when the Dragons attacked. They could have easily targeted our weaker members.”

“That’s not the only issue,” Alexandra said. “I’ve been looking into our crime rate, and it’s surprisingly low. I’m concerned that labeling our weaker and stronger members would make crime more tempting.”

“What’s the Arsenal doing?” I asked.

“This would be a pilot program,” the major said stiffly. “I would propose widespread implementation based on local results.”

“Oh, so we’re to be your guinea pigs?” Alexandra said.

“No, we-”

It went on like that for a while. I didn’t care about the issue nearly as much as either of them seemed to, but I ended up being trapped in a room for a few hours while Alexandra, Tammy, George, Major Fitzgerald, and a few others debated. It felt like a waste of time, but I didn’t trust my judgment on that when everyone else seemed to think it was such a big issue. The meeting ended with an agreement that the “rank” numbers could be used, but only voluntarily. We weren’t going to mandate them.

I was mentally exhausted after that, and I didn’t have any creative ideas to get through to Pointy, and we simply tested the limits of some of the things we’d explored earlier. We found out that a monster had to get within 34 feet of Cassie before Pointy would remember that the monster had existed and that “someone” had killed it if Micah or I took it out, for example.

On Day 9 we made what might have been a small breakthrough, largely by accident. At the beginning of the week, Cassie had been frustrated with Pointy being “naughty” and “ignoring” Micah and me, but somewhere along the lines it had sunk in that Pointy really couldn’t see us. After Cassie realized that, she’d been fairly relentless in asking the turtle about us and trying to get her to notice us. It was very frustrating to her when this caused the turtle to freeze up, and my daughter started to have frequent tantrums. It was pretty heartbreaking. However, on the afternoon of Day 9, her childish rants inadvertently stumbled into something useful.

“You can’t see things, Pointy!”

“I can see far better than you can, Cassie.”

“No. I see things and they are secret to you!”

“What things, Cassie?”

“I can’t tell you!” Cassie sobbed. “They are too secret and you don’t hear me!”

“Do you want me to know the secret?”

“YES!”

“Would you like me to try to figure out the secret?”

“Yes. Try really hard. Like five hard.”

Pointy’s behavior changed slightly thereafter. She asked questions occasionally about things that didn’t quite add up if Micah and I weren’t part of Cassie’s life. It didn’t make her stop locking up or start noticing us, but I was still encouraged. It was the first thing that had happened that really felt like progress